Essays on literary and theological themes

April 16, 2018

Toward a Nagarjunian Commentary on Hegel: Part I: Introduction

Christian or Buddhist?

“We perhaps do not yet know what Hegel’s dialectical sublation really is, or what negativity is: to learn it one must plunge into one’s heart, and that heart is likely to be, if I dare say so, a Christian heart” (Jean-Luc Nancy). Of course in his lectures on the philosophy of religion (1821, 1824, 1827, 1831) Hegel’s machinery of negation and sublation meets the Christian dialectic of death and resurrection; but Nancy must mean that even in the Phenomenology (1807) and the Logic (1812, 1816) the conceptual play has a Christian matrix. The entire movement of these works from abstract to concrete, and in a progress to ever higher levels of integration and autonomy, could have an affinity with Christian schemas of fulfillment and of incarnation. While dialectic has abundant Greek sources, the dynamic and dramatic character of Hegelian dialectic may owe something to Luther and, behind him, to St. Paul. And the primacy of spirit over an external world in Augustinian Christianity provides a historical matrix for Hegel’s effort to realize the promise of Reason’s conviction “that all actuality is nothing other than itself” (132.35-6).

This idealism, the radical conversion of “substance” into “subject,” is not only Christian, but could be correlated with Buddhism too. Remembering that Hegel lived in the period of the Oriental Renaissance, and busied himself with Hinduism, Taoism, and Buddhism in his philosophy of religion and in a remarkable fifty-page essay on the Bhagavad-gītā (1826; text in Rathore/Mohapatra, 87-139), we would not be doing violence to him in tracing affinities and possible interactions between the negative methods of his thought (notably in the central part of the Logic, which powerfully deconstructs one basic metaphysical concept after another) and the negative prowess of Buddhism (notably in the dialectic of emptiness in Madhyamaka thought). Indeed there are some remarks on Buddhism is the Logic itself, but they consign it to a primitive stage in logical development and see it as having “nothingness” rather than “being” as its supreme principle; Hegel knew nothing of the logical refinements of Madhyamaka and Yogācāra. Another affinity between Hegelianism and Buddhism is the presupposition that humans are caught in a condition of alienation and must think their way out of it (see Moyar 3008); that is a Christian and Augustinian theme too, but to take stock of its systematically and work on it diligently, using its own resources to overcome it (as in the Buddhist slogan that “passions themselves are enlightenment”), is a strategy that brings Hegel into closer proximity to Buddhism.

However, Nancy’s question about “what Hegel’s dialectical sublation really is” may be misleading, since Hegel’s dialectical demonstrations explain themselves, always in function of a particular situation. The Greek Skeptics and the Kant of the antinomies(Critique of Pure Reason B 448-595) would have given Hegel an idea of dialectic, and he found that he had a great skill in handling it. This dialectical enthusiasm that keeps the march of rational insight going, in the Phenemenology and the Logic, does not require reference to any extra-philosophical matrix. To grasp its orientation and purpose do we need to “plunge into our heart”? I would say rather that we should attune to the underlying conatus of the entire sweep of the dialectic. We may call this a kind of philosophical eros, an intense search for an intellectual goal that Hegel envisages quite clearly from the start.

The first ripe presentation of that achieved goal is found in the final chapter of the Phenomenology, “absolute knowing.” This final vantage is marked by freedom: Hegel and Schelling, inspired by the French Revolution, devoted themselves to the conquest of freedom in the realm of thought; ultimate reality was to be defined primarily as freedom rather than as mind or as being. Secondly, the final position dissolves the reifications and dualisms that clog the advance of mind; it attains a fully integrated vision marked by nonduality, or a new simplicity (see Cattin). Hegel saw the whole modern world as suffering from painful dualisms: between transcendent God and created world, subject and object, ideal and reality, and his path to overcoming these is through entering deeply into them and explicating their logic. Thirdly, the negative work of the dialectic yields to a negation of the negation, whereby being, reality, immediacy are restored; all the substantial categories that have been overcome are sublated into the life of the subject, of spirit. The subject pole has developed to the powerful integrative knowing of the Concept, and this embraces and penetrates its object pole. With the complete integration of the subject and object poles, of the concept and its content, in realized autonomy and self-sufficiency, dualisms are finally dissolved, and thought may proceed with sovereign demystified confidence.

The restoration of being in a transfigured light in the third part of the Logic resonates remotely with the Christian model of resurrection, but it can also connect with the positive goals of Buddhist reflection, resonating with the Buddhist attainments of release, thusness (tathatā), nonduality. While the mode of progress is rigorously conceptual, it would be wrong to underestimate the role of a certain contemplative intuition. Hegel’s penetrating wisdom is sustained and guided by a spiritual instinct that merits close critical assessment from a Buddhist angle. Such a Buddhist reading would also study the development of Hegel’s quest of nonduality from its origins in the early enthusiasm shared with his fellow-students Schelling and Hölderlin. In the process it could enable a deeper Western philosophical grasp of what Buddhists means by their often puzzling talk of nonduality. The double benefit of comparative philosophy may thus be most fully realized if we do not shy away from a full-scale confrontation of Hegel and the most powerful Buddhist thinkers.

Nonduality and Recurrent Dualities

Since Hegel’s thought issues not in emptiness but in a restoration of being that has integrated all negations, it might seem that there is no promising interaction between the final parts of Hegel’s constructions and Buddhism. Žižek notes that, in comparison with “what is erroneously called ‘Buddhist ontology’” (108), “not even Hegel’s dialectics seems radical enough: for him, Being still has primacy over Nothing, negativity is still limited to self-mediating movement of the Absolute Spirit, which thus maintains a minimum of substantial identity.” However, Žižek notes the special nature of “the properly Hegelian dialectical process, in which negativity is not reduced to a self-mediation of the positive Absolute but, on the contrary, positive reality arises as a result of the self-relational negativity” (149). We might say that being is born of nothingness in Hegel’s thought. On the way to generating positive reality the dialectic undergoes many dramatic crises, not only in the historico-social parts of the Phenomenology but also in the Logic of Essence (or logic of reflection, the central section of the Science of Logic). Each successive positive synthesis is menaced by the original nothingness, into which it may collapse again.

I would add that each successive synthesis is a moment of reconciliation, of unity, and even of nonduality, in which a painful dualism is dissolved; and that the emergence of new dualisms within that momentarily achieved unity is what pushes the dialectic forward again. The dialectic comes to a close only with a fully achieved integration within which no new disruptive dualism can emerge. The utopian sounding pages at the end of the Phenomenology and the Logic celebrate the conquest of intellectual freedom, no longer shackled by painful unresolved dualisms. Thought has reached its full stature as the Concept or the Idea, and has fully integrated its content, fully abreast with the real. Such thought interprets the world, rather than changing it. Yet to release thought into its full capacities is already a contribution to change and liberation. Some will say that this is the feeblest dimension of his thought, and that his dialectic is much more vital and dynamic in its critical, deconstructive, negative deployment. (Some such as Cyril O’Regan and Terry Pinkard argue that Hegel’s dialectic remains an open project that does not reach final closure. That reading should open up Hegel still more for dialogal interaction.)

Hegel’s persistent desire to overcome dualism and the freedom of the final position of integration and simplicity he finally reaches (or at least envisages) might enable us to understand the Buddhist yearning for nonduality. “Yearning” is not an inapposite word here, if the underlying motivation of the dialectic is a philosophical eros in the tradition of Plato, Plotinus, or Spinoza. In Buddhism, desire or craving is what entangles one in delusive reification, cementing the illusion of svabhāva (substantial identity), but a more wholesome aspiration spurs one to dissolve the bonds, purposefully attacking and dismantling the illusion. Enslaving desire is hooked on dualities, but a higher desire for nonduality pushes the mind to defuse these dualities. The path to nonduality and freedom in both thinkers is one that traverses the illusions of svabhāva, in a graded training in emptiness. In Hegel this creates a cumulative progression in insight, which keeps us at every stage from slipping back to inferior categories that are unworthy of what is to be thought. Nāgārjuna, in contrast, seems to tackle one false claimant to svabhāva after another, without a clear cumulative progress; but it might be possible to construct some kind of progress, even if only of a narrative or situational kind, in the sequence of the twenty-seven chapters of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (MMK), or Root Stanzas of the Middle Way, Nāgārjuna’s foundational verse treatise (for the text see Siderits/Katsura).

Hegel’s aim, like the Buddha’s, is happiness: “Every philosophy sets forth nothing else but the construction of highest bliss as idea” (Faith and Knowledge, cited, Stewart, 18). Stewart identifies the components of Hegelian happiness as agreement with our community, knowledge of truth, and radical freedom (20). But there is also a spiritual thirst for presence and simplicity, a thirst to rest in divine infinity. Such religious longing underpins even the first part of the phenomenology, originally to be titled Science of the Experience of Consciousness. The deadlocks the mind meets on its progress are spiritual crises: the despair and doubt of Skepticism, the false approach to nirvanic ultimacy in “the unhappy consciousness.” Each stage grasps the unconditioned, though that grasp is in each case undermined by a dualism, implying contradiction, that it harbors. When reason finally becomes one with its content in objective knowing, and thus prepared to discern and expound the structure of reality in the sciences of logic, philosophy of nature, and philosophy of spirit, it already enjoys a freedom and autonomy that it cannot thereafter lose. The crises the later chapters chronicle are crises of collective consciousness, crises of culture, but at the level of individual consciousness, the situation reached at the end of Chapter Five marks a definitive breakthrough. In Buddhist terms, one might say that the would-be enlightener of humanity has already attained a sufficient grounding in Wisdom at this point, and that the later chapters launch him or her into the wider adventure of Compassion, penetrating the ups and downs of human history so as to guide it to universal reason, absolute knowledge, pervading all spheres of human endeavor.

However even this mature scientific reason is still a long way from the absolute knowing to be reached at the end of the Phenomenology. Reason still belongs among “possible models of cognizing and acting subjectivity, or putative candidates for such a status which, as quite fragmented, partial, and so distorted ‘shapes’ of a possibly experiencing subject, can not actually stand as models of experience at all”; the actual phenomelogy of spirit “only truly begins in Chapter VI” where fully-fledged figures of historical humanity emerge (Pippin, 215). A Buddhist reading of the work’s first five chapters deals with cognitive structures but not with the whole living human being. But perhaps much Buddhist analysis has a similar abstraction and partiality; or at least there may be one level in Buddhist analysis that corresponds in its abstraction to what Hegel sketches in the Ur-phenomenology. Yogācāra philosophy of mind aims at a “transformation of the basis” (āśraya-paravṛtti) that is a thorough ontological conversion of humans in the depth of their being, “a conversion of consciousness from the imagined pattern of truth-clinging to the perfected pattern of reaffirmed other-dependent understanding” (Keenan, 58). Madhyamaka does not embark on anything so concrete and richly existential, which makes it a suitable interpreting text for the Ur-phenomenology.]

Comparative Dialectics

Approaching Madhyamaka from a Hegelian angle, what grips our thought is not its positive teaching on the emptiness of all dharmas, the illusoriness of all svabhāva, which Nāgārjuna inherited from the Perfection of Wisdom sūtras, nor is it its contemplative depth nor its salvific promise as it holds out the simplicity of nirvāṇa as a goal beyond all conceptual efforts. What holds vital interest for a Hegelian is the argumentative prowess of Nāgārjuna, the dialectical machinery whereby he demonstrates the emptiness of all would-be substances and identities. This dialectic is more than logic-chopping. Like Hegel’s, it aims to free the mind of rigid, uncriticized concepts. Each chapter of the MMK exposes entrenched thinking to a series of shocks and encourages its replacement by a more flexible manner of thinking. Some postmodern readers may view this dialectic as just a game, a skillful means for prompting contemplative awakening, with no validity in itself (see Huntington 1989; O’Leary 2010). But a Hegelian will take seriously the labor of the concept, which, though it belongs to the register of conventional truth, not ultimate truth, adheres to the most rigorous logical criteria, and cannot be dismissed as merely a flimsy ludic technique for prompting a leap from reason to intuition. Rather than pouncing on apparent weaknesses in Nāgārjuna’s logic to argue that it is not real logic at all, the Hegelian will fill out Nāgārjuna’s argumentation to bring out its logical force and coherence.

The laconic nature of Nāgārjuna’s writing is not due to a logical deficiency but to a concern that the form of his presentation would accord with its content. Like Hegel, Nāgārjuna had little time for prefatory explanation (“unpassend und zweckwidrig,” says Hegel, in his… Preface [1988:9.9]) but wanted to expound truth in its own terms, in the precise cut and thrust of dialectic. The viewpoints of opponents are reduced to their precise logical content, and the refutation exhibits some aspect of the logic of emptiness. There is a teleology in both Hegel and Nāgārjuna: the ideal of the Concept, the freedom of “absolute knowing,” inspires Hegel’s dialectic, but does not dictate its effects in any given case; insight into emptiness is Nāgārjuna’s guiding thread, but it does not dictate how the sword or scalpel of emptiness will cut in any given argument. Hegel never met anything that could not be integrated by the Concept and Nāgārjuna never met anything whose emptiness could not be demonstrated. This confirmed for both that their dialectic was in tune with the fabric of the real.

How could one challenge such a performance? One can do so effectively only at the local level, challenging the logic of the arguments one at a time, In both cases one faces peculiar difficulties in doing so, for the authors set the rules of their own logic, and even when one manages to reconstruct its progress it is very difficult to establish a vantage-point from which it might be criticized (on the Hegelian case, see Henrich 1971:73-84). In attempting local critiques one meets recurrent—and recursive—stuctures of argument, and these can be the target of a more general critique. I shall not make any particular attempt to criticize the methods of argument on either side, but only to explore how they interact in affinity and difference, and how the Eastern dialectic can bring the Western one into new focus and vice versa. The point and purpose of each dialectic may be clarified and saved from irrelevance when opened out beyond its own echo-chamber. But are there concrete questions in terms of which the two logics can come into mutual interaction? If we take a general topic like causality for example, the arguments on both sides are applied at a very late stage in a long history of reflection on causality, and when we try to reconstitute that history, we may find that what the two traditions are talking about is so different in each case that such a global term as “causality” may not be able to bring both of them together on a level plane or in a shared space.

Negative Dialectic

Hegel “belongs to a long line of thinkers—beginning, perhaps, with the historical Parmenides, running through Sextus Empiricus, and including in our own century the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus—who have thought that the argument which discredits the received views of things and leads to the correct philosophical standpoint ends by discrediting itself as well” (Forster, 284). In Buddhism one casts aside the raft that has served as a skillful means, once it has safely ferried one to the other shore, and Nāgārjuna sees his arguments as fighting poison with poison, perfectly disposable when they’ve done their job. Hegel’s notion of Aufhebung has a similar character. The entire argument of the Phenomenology is sublated (abolished, but preserved in a radically modified form) when the scientific standpoint is established in “absolute knowing.” Within each part of the Hegelian system we see earlier stages vanish into the higher: the logic of being is consumed in the negative logic of reflection and this in turn is negated in the logic of the Concept, where both being and reflection are subsumed into a larger whole. As in some strands of Buddhism there is a “sliding scale” (see Dunne, 53-79) in which what appears as definitive at one level turns out to be merely provisional at the next.In Hegel’s Logic of Reflection, being, which appeared to be given immediately, is revealed as posited by the negative movement of reflection, and to subsist only as show (Schein). Show is “being only as moment, or being affected by nothingness.… Show is a nothingness—not a reality on its own, but only the illusion of being” (DiGiovanni, 146). Reflection nihilates the initial positing of being, reduces being to a moment within a movement from nothing to nothing. This stage in Hegel’s logic can be read as a critical exposition of the status of phenomena in Greek skepticism and in the idealism of Leibniz, Kant, and Fichte. It is surpassed in the final stage of the Science of Logic. But even there, in the dynamic structure of the Concept, being continues to be penetrated by the negative movement of thought: “The essence is the first negation of being, which thereby has become show; the Concept is the second, or the negation of this negation, thus re-established being, but as its infinite mediation and negativity in itself” (Das Wesen ist die erste Negation des Seins, das dadurch zum Schein geworden ist; der Begriff ist die zweite oder die Negation dieser Negation, also das wiederhergestellte Sein, aber als die unendliche Vermittlung und Negativität desselben in sich selbst) (1934:235). This all-pervading movement of negation is the oxygen of Hegel’s thought, ensuring that it remains an enactment of intellectual freedom; whenever he stops short at some positive, unreflected assertion, his thought dies; it lives only by pulverizing purportedly solid points of departure and by rendering purportedly clear goals elusive and fluid, thus remaining a movement from no-thing to no-thing.

The purely negative dialectic of Madhyamaka Buddhism, which issues in emptiness, can solicit Hegelian thought to new horizons, to a “letting-go” wherein it fully accepts its own fragile and provisional status. The MMK, by dint of dialectical quizzing and reductiones ad absurdum, bring all claimants to substantial identity (svabhāva, “own-being”) to confess their self-contradictory and ultimately empty nature. Thus every clinging to them is cut off at the root and the mind is released from bondage to rigid, uncriticized concepts. Could a Hegelian dialectic, hospitable to the power of the negative, take this in its stride as well? Or is reason shown up as merely a strategy for regulating truths of a conventional, world-ensconced, provisional order, its highest role being to allow ultimate emptiness show through the web of conventionalities—an emptiness on which reason has no grip? If reason succumbs to such a radical crisis, this could paradoxically constitute a triumph of reflection; speculation is thwarted but judgment thrives. Integral rationality, Hegel would agree, is that which recognizes its weakness and does not lean with illicit certainty on any of the theses or presuppositions with which it finds itself provisionally furnished. But more than that, it renounces all illicit groping after system, completion, absoluteness, wherein its weaknesses would be eliminated. Speculative ambition cedes to espousal of the wisdom of emptiness. The deconstructive movement of reflection realizes that it can never go back, never heal the wound it has opened. Analysis shows every proposition to have but a fragile and provisional validity. Hegel might object that it cannot do this except in light of some ultimate yardstick. Nāgārjuna would say that no such yardstick is given. In Hegel the power of the negative generates from the collapse of one set of assertions a new and richer set to replace them, but for Nāgārjuna a non-implicative negation (prasajya-pratiṣedha) prevails, which dismantles various illusory objects of mental attachment but asserts nothing. (David Loy would speak of ulimate groundlessness: “The bad news is: there is not parachute; the good news is: there is no ground.”)

If we wager that Nāgārjuna’s dialectic of emptiness can prise the Hegelian system open, instead of being reabsorbed into it, this need not entail that Hegel’s thought is vain and delusive. Emptiness, which a Chinese adage calls “a fasting of the mind,” does not end thought but redirects it. Nāgārjuna and his followers constantly generate subtle arguments in the service of emptiness, and many of these have affinities with the negative aspects of Hegel’s thought. Unlike Kant, who proves contradictories, and who does not put in question the categories of substance, space, or time that they presuppose, albeit giving them a transcendental interpretation, Hegel is more radical, and admits no givens that cannot be explicated and surpassed in logical terms. Nāgārjuna, too, would say that neither of Kant’s contradictory theses can be established, for the categories of time, space, self, are inconsistent, and this inconsistency can be resolved only by recognizing their emptiness of substantial identity. The same is true of all other phenomena. Even the Tathāgata is empty of identity, neither eternal, nor non-eternal, nor both, nor neither; neither having an end, nor not having an end, nor both, nor neither (see MMK 22.12). This negative procedure may seem to repeat over and over again the thesis that all dharmas are empty, discouraging differentiated thought about the various levels of reality and of conceptuality. But each class of dharmas offers a different handle for the negating analysis, and the ultimate sameness of all dharmas insofar as they are empty does not exclude a great variety of strategies to be employed as the mind gently leads each kind of dharma back to the quiet of ultimate reality.

In Madhyamaka dialectic, in contrast to Hegel, “the real is attained by the negation of views not their addition” (Murti, 303). But if the Science of Logic is read as dissolving traditional metaphysics, by expounding its categories in critical dialectic, then the role of negation in his thought brings Hegel into proximity with Buddhism. If Hegelian dialectic is read as concerned not with establishing correct positions but with freeing the mind from bondage to fixed mindsets, it comes close to a Buddhist sense of conceptuality as functional and conventional. If one carries further Hegel’s critical activity of putting a halt to reifying fabrications, it opens onto emptiness, and can expand and enrich Madhyamaka insight into the fragile conventionality of all categories and propositions. (Admittedly, I am soliciting Hegel in the direction of the negative, following Theunissen’s reading, of which not all Hegelians approve.)

Buddhist emptiness accepts the nothingness at work in the heart of being, and thereby discovers that in their very fragility and mutual dependency phenomena become the vehicles of a new freedom. If we think of conventional or “screening” reality, saṃvṛti, as inessential appearances over against the essential reality of emptiness, we miss a more intimate mutual co-implication of conventional and ultimate, wherein to see the conventional as conventional is already to see its ultimate emptiness. The wisdom of emptiness arises from reflection on the conventional; it is that reflection itself; or it is the conventional’s self-reflection. The empty “thusness” that survives the ordeal of the negative cannot be the self-satisfied re-assertion of delusive svabhāva. Rather, it is being that is totally identified with emptiness or that has become a moment of emptiness. “Form itself is emptiness, emptiness itself is form” (Heart Sūtra). We know emptiness only as embodied in dependently originating phenomena, and we know these in their thusness only when we grasp them as self-negating or self-deconstructing, thus confessing their own emptiness. Deepening this insight, one discovers that the frail world of saṃsāra, the realm of pain and impermanence, is not different from nirvāṇa, the realm of blissful emptiness. That was Nāgārjuna’s culminating insight: “There is no distinction whatsoever between saṃsāra and nirvāṇa. There is no distinction whatsoever between nirvāṇa and saṃsāra. What is the limit of nirvāṇa, that is the limit of saṃsāra. There is not even the finest gap to be found between the two” (MMK 25.19-20). The discovery of emptiness is itself blissful nirvāṇa, the quiescence of all grasping and all conceptual fabrications (25.24). Even ordinary everyday life can be the locus for nirvāṇa, and even a nirvanized person can continue to live everyday life, using it as a convention to lead others compassionately to ultimate reality. A retrieval of all Hegel’s arguments in this key would give a new lease of life to his thought.

The many superimposed layers of Hegel’s argumentation and the way in which the solution reached at a given level is relativized and overcome at the next, higher level, recall similar structures in Madhyamaka, such as the rather schematic arrangement in Tibetan debates where what appears as ultimate truth in one of the lower schools (Vaibhāśika, Sautrāntika, or Yogācāra), is seen as merely conventional in a higher school, with Madhyamaka as the highest. Original ignorance (avidyā) generates a cascade of false conceptions, amid which we live, and without which ordinary life would become impossible. Madhyamaka distinguishes ever subtler forms of delusion, both in metaphysical ratiocination and in an underlying subconscious investment in mental habits and presuppositions, cemented by tenacious clinging. Hegel arranges the categories that seek to name the true nature of reality from the simplest to the fullest. Each of them (being, Dasein, essence, identity, ground, existence, power, actuality, absolute, substance, necessity, cause, concept, judgment, conclusion, objectivity, life, teleology, knowing) reveals its limit through its inner contradictions, until in the end the absolute idea emerges as the complete, integral actualization of logical truth. This process should not be seen as a purely positive accumulation. Rather, the labor of dialectic is negative, working not in the direction of ever richer substantiality, but in that of subjectivity and freedom. The categories become lighter and more alive and take the form of an open movement of relating rather than a closed self-sufficient solidity. To each category corresponds an idea of God, from the primitive level of “God is being” or “God is the essence” up to the richly reflected content of “God is idea” or “God is life.”

Hegel’s logic enacts “the activity of the determinations of thought” and shows how in their dialectical movement they “investigate themselves” and “exhibit their lack” (quoted, Theunissen 1980:15). Previous metaphysics, composed from these determinations of thought, is put in movement and overcome. Nāgārjuna does the same for Buddhist conceptions. His critique has two phases that might roughly correspond to Hegel’s logic of being and logic of essence. In the first phase he tackles hypostasized notions of simple independent realities such as “time” as a unitary substance or power, or “past,” “present,” and “future” as independent realities. This can be compared with Hegel’s “critique of an ontology that asserts only beings and indeed beings in themselves” (Theunissen 1980:25). In a second phase the mutual relationship of the three dimensions of time brings a reflected apprehension of time. Temporal concepts have meaning only in relation to another, be it the alleged temporally existing thing or other temporal dimensions. In reflection each temporal dimension is successively the dominant one. Present and future exist only in dependence on past, and thus have no real existence. The same holds for the other two permutations. The three relations of dominance between the temporal dimensions subvert one another. The same logic applies to triads such as “above, middle, below” and to dyads such as “one, many” (MMK 19.4). Similar arguments are used for the relations of seer, seen, and sight (MMK 3), an element and its defining characteristic (MMK 5), desirer and desire (MMK 6), fire and fuel (MMK 10). Reciprocal relationships betoken the nonexistence of the relata.

In a logic of reflection somewhat reminiscent of Hegel’s all these categories are conceived in purely relative terms. But in a further movement of critical analysis these relative determinations are themselves unmasked as svabhāva and their reciprocal dependence is problematized. If two of these moments already exist in the third (or in the case of a dyad, if one already exists in the other), they lose their own identity (versus the Sāmkhya sat-kārya-vāda, the claim that the effect is pre-formed in the cause). If they do not already exist therein, how can they depend on it? (versus the Vaiśeṣika asat-kārya-vāda). Relativity must be thought through to the end, so that every claimed identity of the relata vanishes, and what remains is only a play between conventional designations. Similarly, in Hegel, “the logic of essence unmasks the metaphysical categories as products of the reflecting understanding, which, as we have heard, ‘posits’ the ‘relativity’ of the distinctions. It is to that extent untouched by the critique of indifference in the logic of being, for to the contrary the positing of relativity removes the foreignness in which the relata stand over against each other as long as, on the basis of the assumption of their subsisting for themselves, their reciprocal relation appears as external to themselves” (Theunissen 1980:26).

A Commentary Project

To set up a practicable interplay between Nāgārjuna and Hegel, the method of a commentary is promising, in that we take as a target text one that is already well-known and much commented on (the first five chapters of the Phenomenology) and that therefore provides a secure point of reference, preventing digression into unverifiable or sweeping comparative doxography. Our task is simply to shed more light on Hegel’s text with whatever resources Nāgārjuna’s offers. A Hegelian commentary on Nāgārjuna’s text could complement this. But of course in commenting on the Phenomenology in light of the MMK we are implicitly commenting on the latter as well, for we are sighting the parts of it that are most relevant to Hegel’s text at each phase. If the relevance turns out to be really vital, and to permit penetration of Hegel’s text from a new angle, then this gives a foothold for deeper understanding of Nāgārjuna as well, the sense that, “Ah, this is what he is talking about!” Then the emergent differences or limits on either side will be clearly located as well, which cannot but be instructive.

The very limited textual basis for the Nāgārjuna material—the eschewal of the whole reach of Buddhism, or of Madhyamaka, or even of Nāgārjuna’s own oeuvre (which has many texts of uncertain authenticity or extant only in Tibetan translation—problems that we are spared from having to deal with)—is a salutary limit to the commentarial exercise, ensuring that its yield is clear. Choosing one relatively brief but undeniably central Buddhist text and using it as a key to “unlock” another relatively brief but undeniably central Western text, we should be able to stage a combat at close quarters between the two mental worlds. Of course the commentary will be informed by the fullestpossible background knowledge of both texts, but not to the detriment of the narrow textual focus chosen. Every theme touched on has been the object of endless, complex debate in both East and West. Both texts have been commented on from a great variety of philosophical angles. For instance Nāgārjuna’s overcoming of Abhidharma substantialism and atomism has been compared with Wittgenstein’s polemic against Russell (Gudmunsen 1977), and philosophers such as Peter Strawson are invoked to clarify Nāgārjuna’s argumentation (Streng, 139-42). Only by confining itself rigorously to the two texts can the commentary establish a secure bridge between the two worlds of thought; a more global approach would quickly lapse into the doxographic and unverifiable.

A choice of theme will help prompt and steer the commentary and prevent it from falling into desultory dispersal. In our commentary on the Vimalakīrtinirdeśa (O’Leary 2017) in light of the New Testament we took nonduality as the theme, since it is clearly central to the Buddhist text and since it guided us to the most relevant New Testament texts. In the present case “dialectics” is obviously central in both texts, but we need to identify also a topic or topics on which the two different dialectical ways of thinking come into some kind of convergence. Like a gold prospector we review various promising issues. First are those that arise from the practice of dialectic itself such as the subtle interplay between affirmation and negation, or the relationship between logic and experience or the phenomenal: how does the immanent development of the dialectic square with the opening to experiential data? Then come those that arise from the objects or situations to which the dialectic is successively applied: the correlation between subjectivity and its objects in each of these situations might be analyzed in Buddhist terms. The ontology of being and nothingness could be a theme for interaction: immediacy, being, presence, are pulverized in both dialectics, yet are in some sense restored, even in Nāgārjuna, who admits the ultimacy of nirvāṇa as well as the continuing conventional validity of what is ultimately undercut.

Provisionally, I would pick as guiding theme “the power of the negative.” The point of maximum intersection between Hegel and Buddhism is the role negation plays in his thought. For Hegel every state of consciousness and every thing is the negation of itself; “existence is thus in itself a ‘negation’” (Henrich 1978:216). Negation in Hegel is plural, and in one form or another negation is what gives birth to every philosophical idea (213-14). Do we find the same flexible plurality in Nāgārjuna’s use of negation or can it be reduced to a unitary system? It can be asked if Hegel’s Scienceof Logic is primarily exposition (Darstellung) or critique or if the two procedures are equally basic (Theunissen 1980a:213); a reading that sees in it above all a critique, or that would solicit it in this direction in view of a Buddhist sublation of Hegel’s thought, could enable a reciprocal illumination of Hegel and Nāgārjuna. Hegel affirms the constructive function of negation, in contradiction with its use in Madhyamaka. It is through negative work on the determinations of thought (the Denkbestimmungen) that a free thinking emerges at last, which is called the Concept or the Idea. For Madhyamaka all thinking belongs to the conventional level, and the ultimate is presented as dissolution of conceptual distinctions. Without seeking to erase this point of divergence, we could take Hegel’s dialectic as a construction of conventional truth, which thanks to the role of negation in it is closer than any other Western system to the Buddhist vision of conceptuality. Common presentations of Hegel as a dogmatist and system-builder miss the teeming life of negation in the texture of his writing, which is held in check only by a strenuous exercise of “negation of the negation,” whose ultimate victory is ill-assured.

My commentary will confine itself to the work that Hegel originally intended, and which ended with the fifth chapter, “Reason,” from which there was an easy transition to the Logic, as has been shown by Forster (505-10). This offersa manageable basis for comparison with Buddhist dialectic, again tidily represented by the MMK, the best known Buddhist philosophical text. The “science of the experience of consciousness” (a title that covers the first five chapters of the Phenomenology) is a very manageable corner of Hegel’s system. The object of investigation is far more easily grasped than the very abstract themes of the Logic, and it has not expanded to the vast range of concrete phenomena subsumed under the categories of Spirit. We must admire Hegel’s prowess in thinking out the logic of the relations between abstract determinations of thought (Denkbestimmungen) and his equal prowess in wrestling with the realities of society, history, culture, and religion, thinking dialectically all the time. But for the present we meet him on a middle ground where he is dealing with a concrete object, consciousness, but not with its full overwhelming concreteness as enacted in society and history.